“Are you sure?” Johnny asked, suddenly getting cold feet. “Are you fucking sure? Didn’t Patsy say he had blond hair?”
“That was him, goddamn it,” Drennen hissed. “Shoot, shoot, shoot! Now!”
“Fuck,” Johnny said. “I forgot the stupid cocking lever.”
“I knew I shoulda done it,” Drennen said, now hopping from foot to foot, barely able to contain himself. As he hopped, he moved back farther on the trail but kept the binoculars up.
“Okay,” Johnny said, raising the AT4 back up.
“Dumb shit,” Drennen said, still moving back and inadvertently slipping behind Johnny. “Don’t forget those other two switches.”
Then Nate realized how quiet it was outside. The birds and rodents seemed to be holding their breath. And almost imperceptibly, he heard a sound, a sharp if distant metallic click.
He knew that sound, it was a sound from his past, and he roared in reaction and wheeled inside the mews and threw open the door as the roar and the whoosh filled the canyon.
For Johnny, the muscular thrust of the rocket was exhilarating, and the flash and roar of the explosion inside the cave took his breath away. The heavy boom echoed back and forth from canyon wall to canyon wall, and the sheer power of it seemed to wash over and engulf him and open his pores. The vapor trail hung in the air as if frozen there, a white snail’s-track of smoke that extended from the juniper stand midair over a tumbling river far below and straight into the mouth of the cave.
Nate saw it: a lightning bolt of smoke and light streaking his direction from a thick stand of juniper halfway down the trail.
The rocket vanished into the opening of his cave. The explosion a split second later threw him back into the mews, flattening it, and he crashed to the ground in a sharp tangle of broken willows, broken skin and bones, and panicked falcons.
Johnny jumped to his feet and threw the tube aside and howled, “Jesus! Did you see that? I got him, Drennen! I got that son-of-a-bitch with a perfect shot. Did you see that?”
His ears rung and his hands shook and white-hot adrenaline shot through his veins and he thought it was better than sex, better than money, better than anything. He wished he had a camera with him to get a snap of that vapor trail and the huge gout of smoke rolling out of the cave. He’d put it on his Facebook page.
Then he turned around and saw Drennen writhing on the trail. Drennen’s clothes were on fire, and so was his hair. Acrid black smoke haloed his head. His face was black and swollen and looked like charred meat. He’d stepped right in into the back-blast.
“She told you not to do that,” Johnny said.
Drennen squealed like a little girl, the sound coming from inside his throat. Johnny watched as Drennen rolled in the dirt until the flames were out.
Behind him, a golden eagle lifted up from the smoking debris and caught a thermal and rose into the cloudless blue sky. Johnny turned and tracked it as it rose, mesmerized.
11
Nate Romanowski moaned and attempted to roll over to his belly in the debris, but he couldn’t make his arms or legs respond. He was on his back and he could see the eagle in the sky above him rising up and out of the canyon. His ears rang with a high whine, and his mind seemed to be disconnected from his body, as if his thoughts were a gas that had been released under pressure to form a cloud around him.
He closed his eyes and tried to pull himself together, to reassert control over his limbs and will his thoughts back into his head. Oh, how his ears screamed.
He wasn’t sure how long it took for his faculties to return, but he realized they had—somewhat—when he was able to reach up and rub his face with his hands. His skin was covered with a film of grit. Then, struggling, he managed to flop over to his side. Thin wooden slats from the decimated mews snapped under his weight and his head swooned. He threw up his breakfast and could smell it along with the sharp and familiar stench of the explosives and dust, and the combination made him remember where he was, although he was unsure what had happened.
Through the sound in his ears, he thought he heard a whoop from the other side of the canyon. It was the whoop of a fan whose team had just scored. Painfully, he turned his neck to see, but his vision was fuzzy and he couldn’t focus well. What he thought he saw were two distant figures practically melded together on the canyon trail. They were so close together he thought for a moment they were embracing or dancing. But they were moving up the trail together, attached to each other in some way, for some reason.
Even through his injury and confusion, he knew instinctively they’d attacked him and weren’t out of range if he had his weapon. A long shot, sure, but not impossible. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the hand and eye coordination necessary to make the shot, and he didn’t have his .454. He vaguely recalled taking off his shoulder holster and hanging it on a peg, but he couldn’t remember why. What he did have, he knew, was a serious concussion that made it difficult to think straight.
And then, like a thunderclap, he remembered the reason he’d taken off his holster: Alisha. The sound that came from his throat was unfamiliar, but it sounded vaguely like a woofing bear.
He lurched from smoking tree to smoking tree, burning the flesh on his hands, to the cave entrance. It was eerily quiet; the buzzing in his ears was competing with the pounding of his heart, and he took in the horrible scene with the sound off.
Bits of clothing and hair. Shards of bed covering and chunks of electronic equipment. Her shoe, the foot still in it.
The bear sound came again, low and rumbling, choked off at the end in a yelping sob.
He reached out with a trembling hand and grasped a thick strand of her long black hair that was stuck to the cave wall, and he pulled it into his face and smelled it and it smelled like her.
Nate turned slowly, still holding the hank of hair to his face. The figures he had tracked earlier were nearly to the top of the canyon rim, specks in the distance. The vapor trail of the rocket wasn’t entirely dispersed, and arched across the void. It all came back to him with sickening clarity.
He searched in vain for his weapon inside. It was hard to see in the dust and smoke that hung there, and what he did see and touch enraged and nauseated him. Alisha had always been so much more than a sum of her parts, but that’s all she was now: parts. He felt hollow, as if they’d killed him as well.
And he decided that if he didn’t go after them immediately, they would get away, weapon or not.
He would tear them apart with his hands.
He raced down the canyon. His head pounded and he fought through it as he plunged headlong into the river, splashing through the icy thigh-high current, slipping on slick submerged river rocks, going under, nearly drowning, getting completely turned around by the time he broke through the surface twenty yards downriver from where he went in.
But the cold water served to wake him up a bit, sharpening his senses a few clicks, and when he staggered up the other bank he imagined the two killers close to the top of the canyon now. He imagined them chuckling, high-fiving, patting themselves on the back for the fine shot, oblivious to the fact that he’d soon be on them.
Nate charged up the rough foot trail, his knees pumping, his breath coming in labored honks. He strode through the brush from which he was sure the rocket had been fired and paused to turn and look. He could see the top of his cave from there. A curl of smoke came out of it, like a child’s drawing of a chimney. He noted a Coors beer bottle that had been tossed aside, as well as a couple of bottle caps in the dirt. There would be fingerprints. Even DNA left behind. This confused him, but didn’t slow him. It made no sense that any of the people from his past who were after him would be so sloppy. The Five were professionals, as he had once been. They wouldn’t leave evidence.